The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Users often interact with or control computing and electronic devices through touch input. These devices typically rely on tactile sensors to receive touch input from users. By monitoring a tactile sensor, touch input can be detected when a user touches or otherwise interacts with the tactile sensor. Each tactile sensor of a device, however, may require excitation to enable touch input to be sensed or detected. This excitation is often provided by a set of active components associated with each tactile sensor. These active components can be expensive and consume valuable circuit board space, increasing a cost and space requirement associated with each tactile sensor of a device.
Additionally, the functionality to monitor a tactile sensor is typically offloaded from a main processing entity of a device to off-chip special purpose hardware designed by a third party. Touch input received from the tactile sensor is processed by this special purpose hardware and relayed to the main processing entity. Integrating the special purpose hardware into a device, though, may require development and testing of an additional communication interface to enable communication with the special purpose hardware. This development and testing of an additional communication interface during device development can consume valuable time and resources resulting in increased design costs.